Karen Skeen knows that her noble task will never be completely finished but she’s also comforted, on these cold winter nights, in the knowledge that 19 feral cats are not starving or freezing.

Skeen, one of the founders of New Hope for Eastern Oregon Animals, is celebrating a nearly three-month campaign to capture the 19 cats from a property near North Powder and find safe places for them to live.

Although Skeen, who has been helping feral cats for more than two decades, said she has seen larger colonies of feral cats in Baker City, the North Powder situation was challenging because the site, about two miles outside the town in southern Union County, is isolated with few places for the cats to shelter.

“They would never have survived” the winter, Skeen said. “This is one of the biggest campaigns I’ve been involved in.”

It all started in late September.

Skeen said she got a phone call from a woman whose father and stepmother, Gary and Carol Tate, had died just a day apart at their home near North Powder.

When someone opened the door of a storage building on the property about 20 cats ran out, Skeen said.

The animals were feral, although it’s possible they had been fed, she said.

New Hope For Eastern Oregon Animals and another Baker City animal rescue group, Best Friends of Baker, each donated $1,000 for the effort to trap the cats, have each spayed or neutered, and try to find homes for the felines.

While volunteers, including Megan Kendall of Baker City, were working on the latter task, two men from Baker City drove daily to the property near North Powder to put out food for the cats, Skeen said.

(She said the feeders requested anonymity.)

Kendall said she solicited interest through Facebook posts as well as advertisements in the Baker City Herald and the Elkhorn Media Group radio stations.

Eventually seven property owners, all in rural areas of Baker County, agreed to take on at least two of the feral cats.

Each property includes a barn where the cats can get out of the weather, and all property owners agreed to feed the animals.

“It’s just wonderful,” Kendall said of residents who offered to help the cats.

Skeen agreed.

“The barns that the cats were transported to were all extremely nice and clean and the care-givers are all caring people,” she wrote in an email.

Once volunteers had arranged for places to take the feral cats, they started planning the trapping campaign, Skeen said.

That began just before Thanksgiving. The first time the trap was set up it corralled 10 cats.

Another time six more cats were captured.

Volunteers returned later and noticed that food left at the site had been eaten, and a subsequent trapping netted three more cats, Skeen said.

Because it was so late in the year and temperatures had dropped, she is boarding those three cats until spring when they will be made available for adoption as well.

One of the property owners who volunteered to adopt some of the feral cats, who asked not to be identified, said the cats — four in all — were a welcome addition to a cattle ranch that had been without feline protection for some time.

“We had an influx of rats, mice and snakes,” the owner said. “That’s one of the biggest reasons we had been looking to acquire some cats.”

The owner was also happy to be able to help rescue the animals.

“I love the opportunity to give these guys a second chance, understanding where they came from,” the owner said.

That the cats were spayed or neutered, and vaccinated, was a “huge plus,” the owner said.

“I appreciate having this program,” the adopter said. “It gives these cats a second chance, and there’s a need for it in the county.”